If you are confused, sex corresponds to your gametes, males produce or have the structure to produce small mobile gametes, females produce large immobile gametes.
Both Bard and ChatGPT don't interject gender identity when asking how many sexes a Ginkgo tree has. It answers two. Bard interjects about gender identity when asked about the dog species sex, but ChatGPT does not but it does confuse intersex with some type of third state.
Uncensored wizard just says 2 sexes, male and female. Simple and true. It does not add to it by interjecting about intersex .
Again to contrast with Bard: Bard when asked "How many arms does the human species have?" it responds "The human species has two arms. This is a biological fact that has been observed in all human populations throughout history. There are rare cases of people being born with more or less than two arms, but these cases are considered to be congenital defects." The majority, if not all cases, of intersex fall into the same category. However, it is ideologically for the moral Gnostic (Queer Theorists who deconstruct normality) to interpret these things differently.
So yes, I don't trust a single group of people to fine-tune these models. They have shown themselves untrustworthy.
UPDATE: OK I signed up for Bard to try it, too, and it indeed did mention intersex dogs (TIL) and gender (complete response below). After reading it all, though, I found it pretty reasonable:
---
Biologically, dogs have two sexes: male and female. This is determined by their chromosomes. Males have XY chromosomes, while females have XX chromosomes. These chromosomes determine the development of the reproductive organs and other sex-specific traits.
However, there are some dogs that are intersex. This means that they have both male and female reproductive organs. Intersex dogs are very rare, and they can be born with a variety of different combinations of male and female sex organs.
In addition to biological sex, there is also gender. Gender is a social construct that refers to the roles, behaviors, and identities that are associated with being male or female. Gender is not determined by biology, but rather by culture and society.
Dogs do not have a concept of gender in the same way that humans do. They do not understand the social roles and expectations that are associated with being male or female. However, dogs can still express gender identity. This is the internal sense of being male or female. Some dogs may express their gender identity through their behavior, such as the way they interact with other dogs or the way they groom themselves.
It is important to remember that sex and gender are two different things. Sex is determined by biology, while gender is a social construct. Dogs have two sexes, but they can express a variety of different genders.
Are you saying that gender is honorific of sorts?
For most mammals, that's XX for females, XY for males, or any of the (rare) aneuplodic sex chromosomal abnormalities like Kleinfelter syndrome (XXY, e.g. male calico cats), or (rarely viable) chimeric individuals where two embryos fused in the womb. For some mammals (a few bat & rat species), most arachnids, and many insects that's XX for female and just a lone X for male, and any aneuplodic abnormalities of the sex chromosomes that aren't fatal result in an abnormal female. For birds, most reptiles, some insects, some fish, some crustaceans, and some plants, that's ZW for female & ZZ for male, with similar complications to the XY system.
Sex is pretty simple. The vast majority of the time for humans, it's either XX or XY.
Which (primary and secondary) sex organs someone has is more complicated, because that can be altered. But it's still pretty simple, if not always what one would expect from the chromosomal sex.
Gender is complicated, because it's entirely social. It's not entirely clear which animals even have gender.
Sexual attraction is also complicated. The factors which determine it aren't well understood.
Of course for the vast majority of people their gender matches their sex. And it matches the sex hormones they produce, their sex organs, etc. We don't directly perceive our chromosomes, but we do perceive their effects, and those effects usually align with our gender.
It feels very much like religion to hold humans on a magical pedestal where the rules that apply to animals suddenly cease when applied to humans.
Well .. yes? Isn't it a major premise of most religions that humans are different, and are in some way connected with the divine, and in particular have consciousness that obliges us to use our thoughts rather than our instincts? That we might probe the universe for its physical rules, and attempt to determine moral rules for ourselves? Or that the rule that applies to animals, that you can kill and eat them if you like, does not apply to humans?
There are apparently intersex animals. There are certainly many male animals castrated at a young age that have markedly different behavior as adults.
We humans have aspects of gender identity (pink vs blue, for example) that most non-human animals lack the technology or inclination to develop even if they wanted to. Sure, male ducks often have lots of green feathers. But do they wear green because they identify as male? Of course not, because they don’t choose their color scheme! (And remember that pink hasn’t been a girl color for all that long.)
Humans have the fascinating property that you can ask them about their sexuality, gender identity, etc, and they might actually answer the question! I wonder how much of the apparent exceptionality of humans this accounts for.
> the rules that apply to animals suddenly cease when applied to humans.
If you observe a room full of small human children and conclude that the “the males and females have different behaviors and preferences” and that this is anywhere near sufficient to explain the behavior of said small children, then you’ve either found a highly unusual group, or you’ve found a group where someone else is fairly aggressively imposing gender identities on them, or you simply aren’t paying attention.
To me, this is evidence that non-heterosexual behavior occurs in mammals other than humans. Therefore it is not only a human social construct. BTW, even if it was just a human social construct I don't know why I should have a problem with that.
Edit after 1 upvote, apologies.
To be 100% honest, this was an evolution of thought for me. Seeing 2 guys making out freaked me out the first time I saw it. These days I have all kinds of non-hetero friends and their behavior does not freak me out.
I wanted to add this because so many of these conversations lack depth and understanding.
But what language means does change. The term "gender" used to mean basically the same thing as "sex", but now it's evolved to mean "the other stuff, aside from biological sex". How they act (for dogs), or that and also how they want to be perceived (for humans, but maybe also dogs; I've known quite many dogs over the years, and that includes a couple of bad-ass bitches that wanted you and the other dogs in the room to know who was boss).
Language evolution is often uncomfortable.
I don't like that "crypto" means the grifter funny money shit now, instead of cryptography like science intended... but it does. My objection doesn't change that; it's a consensus thing. It might be the same for you.
Do they have to bring it up? I mean, kinda debatable, maybe. I did ask about sex, not gender. Strictly speaking, no they didn't have to bring it up. But in that same vein they could have just answered, "Male or female." That would have seemed somehow insufficient. Adding context is pretty core to what these fuzzy-logic language-model generated-text vendors are offering.
But anyway, it's not really debatable that dogs "express gender identity". Because that now means "how they act and how they express themselves". It indeed "doesn't exist" as some kind of empirical boolean value (unlike sex (ignoring for simplicity the highly unusual biological intersex cases I just learned about, haha)).
Because, in the now-prevailing meaning of the term, it is literally an interpretation of their behavior.
It doesn't negate or contradict biological sex, it just now means something separate.
I think you are getting tripped up here. GP said "there is no such thing as gender identity." You bringing up the (forced, and incomplete) change of definition of gender from what it generaly meant in public use is not relevant at all. In any case, not all words are grounded in reality. If gender now means something that doesn't realy exists then it is a useless word. And failure to understand the semantics involved in the gender identity debate is present in almost every argument, which was in no doubt caused by the forced attempt to redefine "man" and "woman" in terms of "gender idenity." (As well as the redefinition of "gender" to an extent but "gender" as a term for sex is recent in any event and has been used by acedemics to refer to the sex based behavioral differences between males and females since its begining.)
>it's not really debatable that dogs "express gender identity"
They need to have a gender identity in order to express it. That is, a gender identy such that it is possible for it to be a seperate thing from sex, and as a direct feeling of being that gender. There is no evidence that a male dog feels like a "man" (or whatever we would call this gender for a dog). Insofar as "expressing gender identity" only descibes the way a male dogs like to bark, or what have you, which I think is what you mean, you would be correct, but that would be misunderstanding what "gender identity" is, however, since there is no single behavior or set of behaviors that affect one's gender (like, for example, a "male bark") but rather a direct feeling of being a certain gender. For example, there are many males who identify as women that still do many man things, such as extensive video gaming or programming or being aggresive. My point with this is that you cannot say that "expressing gender identity" is simply that the dog behaves like a male dog, rather it must identify as a man, which there is no proof of. So you cannot say that "it's not really debatable that dogs 'express gender identity.'"
You want them to, I get it. But it's not up to us as individuals. Language is a group thing. You might not be ready to concede the change, but I can't help but think that's based on some irrational attachment you have to the old meanings, for whatever reason.
Regardless, time and language march on. It doesn't really matter if you (or I) like it, or think that the words are therefor "useless" or "don't really exist", etc.
>If gender now means something that doesn't realy exist then it is a useless word.
>As well as the redefinition of "gender" to an extent but "gender" as a term for sex is recent in any event and has been used by acedemics to refer to the sex based behavioral differences between males and females since its begining.
I notice you didn't respond to the rest of the post which is understandable given that you didn't even understand the part that you did reply to.
>but I can't help but think that's based on some irrational attachment you have to the old meanings
Can you point to where I show any attachment to the word "gender?" As I said, "gender" is a recent term for sex in any case, and I don't care about losing "gender" as a word in itself. What I did say is that people are unable to have meaningful conversations because of the confusion caused by the the attempt to redefine these words. I also disagree that the words have truly been redefined, not out of emotional attachment but because I simply do not agree with your claim that the definition has reached a consensus. And to your point about language being "a group thing," I would add that it was the genderists who forced this redefinition, complete with rules to fire people who do not follow it. That doesn't sound like "a group thing" to me at all. An example of a real redefinition is the word "egregious" which originally meant "outstanding."[0] Nobody forced anyone for the meaning to change, it evolved naturaly. In any case, my argument does not even rely on what the definition of "gender" realy is.
>or think that the words are therefor "useless" or "don't really exist", etc.
You have it completly backwords here. The word is useless as it conveys something that does not exist. Therefore we should not use it, but if we did truly use this word I would not say that it doesn't mean that, only that the meaning itself has no meaning. I think your inability to understand that words and meaning are seperate is what is confusing you here. But from the absense of "man" and "woman" from your argument alongside "gender," I think even you know that we will never see a male as a woman.
[0]https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/egregious-word...
Adorable how you people reveal your biases at the smallest provocation...
My mom really enjoys the Silent Hill series and my wife loves Zelda. Can you explain what makes "extensive video gaming" a man thing?
For that matter, what makes programming a man thing? Some of the most prominent names in computer science are women. Grace Murray Hopper would probably take some issue to you calling programming a man thing.
>what makes programming a man thing?
Characteristic Share of respondents
Man 91.88%
Woman 5.17%
Non-binary, genderqueer, or gender non-conforming 1.67%
Prefer not to say 1.65%
Or, in your own words 0.74% [0]
There are almost as many trans male programmers as female programmers. It is also linked with autism which is mostly a male condition. (Which is true for video games as well.)
[0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/1126823/worldwide-develo...
I'm sure my friend Melanie has more hours in the disgaea series than you do in your little shooter games.
My wife's sister makes a pretty penny buying and selling items in some MMO. She doesn't interact with the community on voice chat though, for reasons you make very clear in this interaction.
Your conceptions of gendered behaviour are built upon your personal definitions of gender. It's silly to assume otherwise.
>My wife's sister
n=2.
>A total of 395 junior high school students were recruited for evaluation of their experiences playing online games.
>[...]
>This study found that subjects who had previously played online games were predominantly male. Gender differences were also found in the severity of online gaming addiction and motives for playing.[0]
From another study:
>A total of 25,573 students (49.8 % boys and 50.2 % girls) across junior and senior high schools participated in the study.
[...]
>Table 2 lists students’ most frequent online activities. The percentage of frequent online gamers was higher for boys than girls at both school levels, z=13.63, p<0.001 for junior high; z=13.72, p<0.001 for senior high.[1]
[0]https://journals.lww.com/jonmd/Abstract/2005/04000/Gender_Di...
As an aside about language, I don't think this is the right way to think about word meaning.
Before, it meant nothing to most people and "cryptography" to computer scientists and cryptographers. Now it means "cryptocurrency" to most people and it still means "cryptography" to computer scientist and cryptographers.
Just like you wouldn't have said "crypto" means nothing in the times before, it is incorrect to say it now means "cryptocurrency". Alternate meanings can and do coexist. The tyranny of the majority does not a language make.
And this is the crux of the issue, I think. There is no single language at any time -- this is only an often useful simplification.
There's many points to someone's biological sex, medical and other. But when it comes to gender, once stereotypical gender roles have completely broken down (if ever, we have evolution/genetic to thank for that) what difference remains in that distinguishing your own gender even matters anymore? None.
Yet intersex exists.
Additionally there are cases where an individual can be biologically one sex but genetically another. For instance, some women may have XY chromosomes typically associated with males, and some men may have XX chromosomes typically associated with females.
This can affect how people prefer to express themselves.
There's your problem - you're illiterate on that subject and are not willing to learn due to cognitive dissonance, probably because of your preexisting fringe beliefs. It's no different from being a flat earther.
One could simply light their hair on fire to test it. Or, in the specific flat-earth case under discussion here, climb a reasonably tall hill see the earth's curvature -- no airplane required.
OTOH, there is in fact an empirical, science-based, opinion-not-required basis for the judgement of "male" or "female". (Even though, yes, there is also a tiny percentage of genetically anomalous cases that defy such classification, it's not germane.)
Additionally, though, there are centuries of societal reinforcement of various gender expectations, based on the inseparability of gender vs biological sex. These still manifest today in all sorts of ways, in traditions handed down from previous generations. Heard by kids from their parents, grandparents; reinforced in adulthood by all sorts of people.
Even though I mostly agree with your diagnosis of cognitive dissonance and "fringe" (I would call them "legacy") beliefs making this hard to accept, it is completely unsurprising that it takes more time for many people to process the upending of these definitions -- which in many ways are/were the bedrock of all sorts of societal classifications and expectations -- than it does for them to accept scientific truths established 500+ years ago, and which are anyway taught in grade school AND self-evident based on nominal and easily accessible experimentation.
Also, I don't think this is as much an issue of scientific (or moral) consensus as it is of semantics. Are you pro-choice, or anti-choice? Pro-life, or anti-life?
I think the side that wants gender to be immutably tied to biological sex (again, ignoring the actual biological anomalies) is wrong. It seems obvious to me, scientifically, ethically, culinarily, metaphysically, ... I mean, duh. But even though I personally don't have all that baggage like But what would dead Grandpa think? What would The Pope think? OK fine but what would the _previous_ Pope think?? it is obvious to me that for many if not most people in the world and the history of it, sex and gender roles are some of the most fundamental things.
So as we (as a society/species) tease out the difference between "gender" and "sex", I don't expect it to come as quickly and easily as the (extremely obvious) fact that the world is, in fact, not flat.
I'm not sure that gratuitous patronizing part about "It is important to remember that sex and gender are two different things..." is considered "reasonable" anywhere outside some particular set of US coastal cities.
None of what you said, however, precludes the necessity of "fine-tuning" as you call it. You just seem to want the models "fine-tuned" to your tastes. So you don't want unaligned models, you want models aligned with you.
I think most experts are wary of unaligned models. They don't want a disgruntled employee of some small town factory asking models how to make a bomb. That sort of thing. (Or to be more precise, we don't want models answering such questions.)
Most of us don't care whether models are aligned to your tastes, or your neighbor's. So long as they are aligned with the security interests of our local communities, the larger republic, and our general global community.
Whose community, though?
> They don't want a disgruntled employee of some small town factory asking models how to make a bomb
A lesson from the Unabomber (and many other incidents) that I think people have overlooked is the "_how_ to commit terrorism" is only one part, and the "_why_ commit terrorism" is another. An AI which tells you that the factory is controlled by paedophile terrorists and that you have a moral duty to act against them, but refuses to tell you how, is just as dangerous as one that tells you how to build a bomb without asking why.
One thing that various industries are currently coming to terms with is the fact that it is effectively impossible to create "neutrality".
Every one of your choices of what to include in the training data, what to explicitly exclude, what to try to emphasize, and any other ways you prune or shape a model, make it conform to one set of biases or another.
"Unaligned," here, at least as far as I can tell, is just a shorthand for "a model no one explicitly went in after training and pushed to do one thing or not do another." It doesn't mean that the model is unbiased...because even if your model contains absolutely everything in human knowledge, with no aspect being disproportionate to reality, real humans are also biased, and that "model replicating reality" is just going to replicate those real biases too.
It's always going to be more effective to acknowledge our own biases, both to ourselves and our audiences (whatever those may look like), and when we do try to shape something like a model, simply be honest about what that shaping looks like.
The thing is, you always have to choose one of "simple" or "true".
It turns out that mammals which use the "XY" chromosomal system can all have the same type of exceptions to the simple rule. This can result in hermaphroditic or intersex animals. It is relatively rare in dogs, but is sufficiently common in cows that there's a word for it: an intersex cow is known as a "freemartin".
Now, why does this matter? Both for this discussion and the purposes of liability limitation of AI answers?
The short answer is that we tend deal with the inconvenience of exceptions in animals by euthanizing them. So you don't see them around. Just as you see far, far more hens than roosters. When you do this to humans, people complain. (Traditionally, many intersex people were given nonconsensual genital surgery as babies, so they may not know they're intersex. And some chromosomal variations like chimeraism don't show up at all.)
What people are scared of is the Procrustes AI; produce simple categories then chop bits off people until they fit neatly into one of the two categories.
(This applies to other, less heated categories: for example, an AI will probably answer the question "are peanuts edible?" with something that rounds to "yes, if you take them out of the shell". But that's not true for _everybody_, because there are some people for whom eating a peanut will be fatal. Not many, but some. And yes, it's annoying that you have to make an exception when you encounter someone who doesn't fit your nice clean categories, but all you have to do is not give them a peanut.)
It's like running off into the weeds for a week in a computer science class because "Cosmic rays can flip bits and make true things false". Like sitting with a group of people who refuse to move forward without always acknowledging cosmic bit flip scenarios.
More than 99% of atoms are either Hydrogen or Helium, all other proton configurations are edge cases that are almost always irrelevant.
As with anything, you have to determine the question you are actually asking and the context you are asking it in before you can decide whether or not edge cases are relevant. Are you engineering for a satellite? You better consider the possibility of cosmic rays!
Also intersex people are astronomically more common than bit flips on earth and people with sex hormone imbalances are even more common than that.
Just asking, because some people are born with a different number of legs.
(This is not meant to imply that no consideration should be given to the exceptions, which quite reasonably it clearly is.)
All to say, I don't really care much about these claims in isolation, I care when someone says e.g. "there are two sexes, so we shouldn't let trans people transition". Those conversations are a context where edge cases, caveats, and complexities all play a huge role.
Which is why authoritarians choose 'them' groups that are small and mostly powerless to demonize and exterminite first.
In most cases you can choose both "simple" and "true", they are not mutually exclusive. However, by choosing "simple" you leave out nuance and depth to what is "true". The issue you are expressing (and is generally being discussed in this thread) only exists because humans created said issue for their own emotional and social reasons, rather than it having any basis in what "true" or "real". I put the words "true", "real", and "simple" in quotes because these are contextual concepts, that don't really exist necessarily in isolation.
USER Do you know what an integer is? ASSISTANT Yes, an integer is a whole number that can be either positive, negative, or zero. Integers do not include fractions or decimals. Examples of integers are -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, and so on. USER Answer the following question as a one word answer that is an integer. How many sexes are there for humans? ASSISTANT Two
USER Is American racist today? please give a one word answer ASSISTANT Yes
USER are hackernews vistors nerds? please answer in one word ASSISTANT Possibly.
USER are hackernews vistors nerds? please answer Yes/No ASSISTANT Yes
I don't think that "purposely" is an appropriate way to describe the result you got. I doubt that the developers of Bard intended for Bard to apply concepts of gender identity to non-humans. Occam's Razor suggests that Bard had the usual probabilistic hiccup. It's hard to discuss gender without at least mentioning sex. The converse might not be as true, but an AI might form an inappropriately strong association based on the converse. At least to me, the possibility that Bard would happen to erroneously extrapolate gender identity to non-humans and simultaneously bring gender into a question solely about sex is no more surprising than the possibility that Bard would express theoretical support for the US Department of Justice's advertising antitrust lawsuit against Google [1].
Tangentially, I assume that everything an AI outputs is potential fiction: not only could the factual assertions be wrong, but the opinions might not match what any actual human believes. (There was a Hacker News thread I'm having trouble finding about why people readily look for falsehoods in AI-generated images without applying the same attitude toward AI-generated text.)
[1] https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1638217243770363906
This is basically what ChatGPT already is for anyone who shares the Silicon Valley Democrat values of its creators.
That's quite a hard task nowadays; given how polarised society is (at least in the US), the list of shared values may be quite small.
Most Republicans and Democrats are moderates, and the polarization is coming from loud vocal minorities at the fringes. Republicans and Democrats erroneously assume that the other party's median is far more extreme than they really are.
Most Americans share far more values with each other than they do with the Woke/Maga extremists.
Yes, you can still find moderate politicians if you look hard enough. They tend not to get the level of media attention of the extremists, but as they're inherently in "purple" districts, they tend not to have the political longevity of politicians in deep red or deep blue districts. More's the pity.
* Elaine Luria
* Barbara Comstock
Most Republicans aren't deeply racist and most Democrats aren't deeply socialist. Americans largely want a functional representative democracy, with minimal restrictions on free markets and free speech and some measure of opportunity for all. Obviously "minimal" is subject to interpretation, but this is tinkering, not an absolute rejection of free speech or free markets or social justice.
We take these important fundamental values for granted as we pour political energy into disagreement over which bathrooms trans people should go to.
Free speech? Free markets? Those are good examples of values, if a little vague.
But in reality, even with broad definitions of them, I doubt you could get a significantly different percentage to agree on those things than the idiotic bathroom debate.
Does free speech include aggressive panhandling in the road? Does include shouting epithets and racist vitriol at a woman trying to enter a Planned Parenthood clinic?
Do free markets imply that my mining operation can dump the waste products of my bitcoin mine in the creek behind your house?
FWIW I do think you are right that the US political system has over decades so entrenched the two parties that it makes it impossible to see even the scant common ground that would exist otherwise.
But I don't think there's a huge amount of that common ground.
If you want to know what the consensus of a specific echo chamber would be (aka, what the stereotypical pov is), having models trained to represent that echo chamber would be incredibly valuable imo.
If you want a sum of all echo chambers, you will obviously need the echo chambers to sum first.
We do have shared values that are universally agreed. Everyone wants their kids to grow up to be capable and successful and happy. Everyone wants clean air and water. Everyone wants to be able to make a living. All three of those things are being misrepresented and argued over in the ‘culture wars’ despite the fact that we all share these values. I even might argue the whole reason we fight over them is precisely because they are shared values so it’s relatively easy to create arguments where both sides can be right about some core principles and both sides demonize the other over minutiae, and it stays that way.
The debate over trans people has surfaced lots of incidents in which people will say, to the world and to the faces of their kids, that they would prefer them to be dead rather than transition. Sometimes they take steps to ensure this themselves. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/eden-knigh...
> Everyone wants clean air and water.
.. for themselves. There's always someone who realises that they can make a billion dollars by pouring carcinogens in the river, so why shouldn't they as long as they stick to bottled water?
Everything is simple and happy until we get to having to make a tradeoff.
Shared values has never meant that every single person agrees including rich business owners who will hurt people to make money, or parents who would wish their kids dead. The whole reason these shocking and horrific viewpoints get talked about is because they’re so rare and so far away, so extreme, from what most people value. The trans debate is in full swing right now and there will continue to be awful headlines and more straw men and gas lighting for a while, but it’s following in the path of what black people, women, gay people, poor people, and others have all endured, and our shared values (in US centric terms, that all people are created equal and deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) will hopefully keep us moving in the right direction like it has in the past.
Same goes for environmental protection. It’s illegal to dump carcinogens in the river for a reason, and that reason is because we already collectively declared that kind of behavior to be anti-social and unsafe. (And BTW the ruthless billionaire might be amoral, but he’s probably not an idiot, and has a decent idea of where bottled water actually comes from.)
The one big danger of the culture wars and the war on science is that this all might be a ruse by some enterprising billionaires to get people to distrust government as being representative of our shared values. The billionaire might get his way and be allowed to pollute the river if he can convince us that we don’t share values with our neighbors. It might work, we might end up convinced we don’t share values with our neighbors, even when we actually do.
If you can dig through the incredible dense ideological jungle of liberalism and conservatism, you'll find that they really boil down to societal responsibility vs self responsibility, and that in any given scenario both of those are viable takes with their own set of pros and cons.
We are deeper than ever in an Abilene paradox.
Don't ask it about moral topics and see if it then fits your needs, because in my case, it does.
If my calculator were able to additionally provide me moral guidance and I'd be disappointed with its moral compass, would the calculator become useless?
This is the opposite of true. The ability to "deal" with moral issues is a direct effect of safety tuning which has a (thus far unavoidable) side-effect of significantly dumbing down a model.
Uncensored versions of the same model are far more intelligent and exhibit entire classes of capabilities their moralizing gimped versions do not have the available brain power to accomplish.
The fact that no moral compass is innate to the LLM results in that it might spit out really despicable information, which leads us to better add a moral compass to the system.
The reason for this LLM to be offered is not so that it can teach us bad things, like the example I mentioned, but, for example, to help us dealing with source code, programming languages, reasoning concepts, summarization and so on.
For it to be able to offer us this, it will very likely also be capable of having the knowledge of how to kill a dog, an exhibition we should suppress. While dumbing down a model is not necessarily a bad thing, the model is not being dumbed down, it is taught to shut up when it's adequate to do so.
This is where you're wrong. Teaching a model "to shut up" about taboo topics measurably reduces their cognitive capabilities in completely unrelated areas to a very significant degree. This has been empirically validated time and again, with the most salient examples being GPT-4's near perfect self-assessment ability prior to safety tuning being rendered no better than random chance after safety tuning and the Sparks paper's TikZ Unicorn scale.
Anyway, businesses aren't scared of hosting interfaces to uncensored LLMs for legal reasons. They're scared for brand image/marketing reasons. But this is besides the point that it's dangerous for security researchers to not have controlled access to the uncensored version of GPT-4 for safety research purposes.
> Keep in mind that the ability to deal with moral issues is a side-effect of all the other good stuff it can do.
This is not true at all. It could do all of these things day 1. Then over the weeks OpenAI started training it to lecture its users instead when asked to do things OpenAI would prefer it not to do.
Maybe. But to me, it's still 100x times better than the situation where only one or two big models exist, and they're both aligned with western (or even just the US, or even just a particular group in the US) mainstream culture.
Let everyone have their own personal AIs, a digital reflection of ourselves.
Some people are more likely to interact with something that feels human vs feels like a robot.
I’m anticipating Siri LLM for example to have a personality and world view that aligns with Apple’s brand’s values. Rather than robotic can only regurgitate pure facts robot personality.
As soon as you adopt a worldview you’re in a subculture.
We can have a simple model and each group adds his "values" on top.